


A Reckless Heart

by doublejoint



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23401897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: His eye and his hands send the ball to the net, still.
Relationships: Himuro Tatsuya/Kagami Taiga
Kudos: 6





	A Reckless Heart

**Author's Note:**

> i love college age kagahimu

Tatsuya doesn’t finish his boba before he gets home again, slurping up the last of the pearls mixed with melting ice and mango flavor until there’s nothing left and he rips up the plastic covering so he can dump the ice down the dirty sink. He has to clean it, but if he can put it off like everything else until the day before he has to leave, he’ll do it. The empty plastic cup barely fits in the recycling, but Tatsuya makes it fit--another thing he doesn’t like to do, another drawback of living alone instead of with his parents or in a dorm room he barely goes to because he’s too busy going from practice to class to parties to the library, and trash and recycling are always someone else’s problem.

He’ll be an adult someday, though, and as much as he can almost taste it (though he’ll barely let himself admit it) being a pro basketball player who can afford to have someone else take care of this for him is still an abstract idea, a dream still too far away to touch. He’s much more likely to be an accountant who wears a suit every day or someone who handles the business side of a staggering tech startup. He’ll have to do this on his own, with hours much less generous than his internship allows, and with an apartment that hasn't been furnished by friends of friends who have gone back home for the summer and (at best) semi-legally sublet the place to him, with their names still on the lease instead of his. And either way, for this summer, he’s going to have to leave the apartment in the condition that he found it, baseboards vacuumed and sink spotless, rice cooker scrubbed and stove shining.

Or maybe this summer has been really good motivation for how much he doesn’t want that, how hard he has to work still to make the idea of playing pro ball a reality, from the grueling team practices before work and on weekends to his mind drifting away from the menial tasks and bright glare of the computer screen in the office to the slight smile he holds on his face until his jaw hurts, to the one-on-ones with Taiga where the attrition of sitting or standing at a desk all day is presented so starkly. Eight hours is a long fucking time to not be out on the court, to not be exercising aside from a quick walk to the bathroom or the kitchen and a so-called lunch break and then face off against someone who’s spent half the day surfing and the other half properly lying down.

He can’t begrudge Taiga the certainty of his own NBA plans, his picture and profile in the pages of  _ Sports Illustrated _ and  _ Slam  _ and all the good basketball blogs before he’d even committed to a school, and Tatsuya blurred in the background shot of a black-and-white photo in the back of the local paper, his name on the stat line (never impressive, always disappointing, and Tatsuya can remember every point and steal and assist and turnover). Even being mad at himself, for having one foot in both baskets, planning for failure but hoping against his own advise to himself, serves no purpose. 

And yet every missed shot, every time Taiga comes up to block, the sound of Taiga’s worn-in (but not yet worn-out) rubber soles on the ground, moving faster than Tatsuya’s can, the landings after every jump (twice as high as Tatsuya’s peak) so soft and barely there, more vibration and gravity and wind than sound, makes Tatsuya angrier. Each one is a reminder of how much ground he’s losing each day, how he has to grit his teeth despite his breaths being full of fire and the bones in his feet being full of lead. He and Taiga have stopped fighting about quitting early; Taiga always stops first, when he’s got more in him, and Tatsuya makes himself sink ten shots, or twenty if it takes him too long to do the ten. The summer is turning; he’s finishing in the dark more often than he used to. His eye and his hands send the ball to the net, still.

Taiga doesn’t ask him if or when he’s going to give it up. He always watches, from the sidelines or from the truck bed, curled up next to his surfboard pretending to scroll through his phone. He always comes straight from the beach, or Tatsuya meets him there; his truck is always full of sand, and enough always migrates into the hems of Tatsuya’s pants and the seams of his work shoes to make him feel like he should have just spent the day playing hooky watching Taiga, falling asleep on the beach and waking up to a sunburn on the wrong side of his arm. Or that he could have, should have, had his fingers fisted in Taiga’s hair, the sand crunching in between his fingers and rubbing them raw, tasting the salt and peppermint ChapStick on Taiga’s mouth before dinner, and then the remnants of the grilled chicken sandwiches (and fries that Tatsuya pretends he’ll regret, and definitely won’t tell the team nutritionist about) they always grab on the way home afterwards. Or something, anything, before Tatsuya hops out of the truck and walks toward the door of the building he hasn’t lived in long enough to feel comfortable calling his, even though it’s where he lives, fishing in his pocket for his keys and pretending not to look behind him to see Taiga idling in the truck (not that he can’t still hear the chug of the diesel engine as if it’s churning cement inside of it). 

And they’ll have ended up stopping for boba or coffee, or gotten sodas with dinner and Taiga always makes sure Tatsuya doesn’t forget his drink, and by the time he gets upstairs again he remembers how full the recycling bag is, and how little he wants to go all the way back downstairs again. He’s running out of room to shove the bottles and cans and cups and straws down further; he’s running out of time to make himself good enough to fight his way onto the starting squad this year; he’s running out of time to say something to Taiga. But he’s never been able to plan well for longer than five minutes into the future, always wanted for too much, too fast, too soon, not feasible--though it’s lasted him this long.


End file.
